We all reacted with surprise. “Holy Mother of God, I never thought of that. Have there been any rumors of that ilk, Mary?” I asked.
Mary shook her head. “I can’t say I’ve heard any rumors about his private life recently. Of course everyone in Paris is expected to have a mistress, so that would hardly have been worth mentioning. But a male companion? I’m sure I would have heard about that.”
“The one thing I did ascertain is that nobody will be at the apartment tomorrow. The housekeeper is coming back on Monday to give the place a thorough clean so I really must try to get a look at it before everything is moved and packed away.”
“How do you propose to get a look at it, dare one ask?” Sid said.
I grinned. “I was hoping to borrow a pair of your trousers and climb up the tree. It seemed as if the end window wasn’t quite shut tight, so I thought…”
“Molly, you’ll be arrested for breaking and entering,” Mary said. “You’ll also make Inspector Henri even more suspicious about you than he already is.”
“Molly, don’t take any stupid risks for me,” Sid said. “I’m sure it will all sort itself out, and if it doesn’t, we’ll just find a way to slip out of the country and catch a boat home.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I said. “If I am caught I’ll confess to being a newspaper reporter, hoping to write a scoop on Reynold Bryce for the Boston papers. They can be annoyed with me, but they wouldn’t charge me with anything. Newspaper reporters can get away with murder—” I broke off at that choice of words. “I didn’t mean that literally,” I said.
“What will you think of next?” Gus shook her head.
I looked around the room, now bathed in midday sunlight. “Where’s Liam?”
“Sleeping like a baby,” Gus said. “We played with him and then put him down for his morning nap. He’s such fun now. We love his laugh. Sid kept balancing a matchbox on her nose and then letting it fall.”
Sid laughed. “It didn’t fail to amuse him for a good half hour.”
“Babies are wonderful, aren’t they?” I said. “I was thinking last night about how uncomplicated life is for them. As long as they are warm and fed and have someone they trust near them then nothing else matters.” I fought back an unwelcome surge of emotion. After what we had just gone through tears were liable to resurface too often. Having prided myself on being such a strong woman I couldn’t abide this show of weakness. Instead I turned my attention to the paintings. The one that now lay on the sofa was of the young girl with haunted dark eyes.
“I particularly noticed this one when I packed them up,” I said. “It’s quite good, isn’t it? Sad, but well-done.”
“It’s one of Maxim’s,” Sid said.
“Who?” Mary asked.
“My cousin. Maxim Noah.”
“Ah yes, you spoke of him, I remember now,” Mary said. “You say you just discovered him living in Paris?”
“It was rather fortuitous,” Sid said. “Right before I left, my mother wrote to tell me we had relatives in Paris and asked me to look them up. I went around several synagogues but I couldn’t find any Goldfarbs who could have been related. Then I was at a poetry reading and was chatting to this most attractive young Jewish man. We started talking about families and when he said that his mother was a Goldfarb and her father had come from Eastern Europe when she was a small child I started asking questions. And it turned out that his grandfather had had a falling out with his brother. One had gone to New York, one stayed in Paris. And the brother’s name was Nathan, which was my grandfather’s name. Wasn’t that an amazing coincidence? So we concluded we were long-lost cousins. He lives in a shack on Montmartre. Horribly primitive, but I think he’ll make his name as a painter very soon. I plan to take some of his pictures to New York and maybe bring him over some time and hold a showing for him.”
“How interesting,” Mary said. She bent over the painting, then sat back on the sofa again. “Yes, I think his work does show some promise. When all is well again I’d like to meet him.”
Gus touched Sid’s arm. “And do you think he’d be able to help us? He could go anywhere within the Jewish community without arousing suspicion. He could attend meetings at synagogues and of the pro-Dreyfusard brigade. They might have an idea who carried out this murder.”